Open Access: a “chronology” (or timeline)

I was first introduced to open access in early 2012, through the website of CERN, where the web started in 1990. All that I knew so far was about Creative Commons, Wikipedia and the Public Library of Science (PLOS), probably a good start but not enough. I am learning about open access every day, and will try to enrich this timeline (“chronologie” in French) when/if possible. The purpose is not a list with hundreds of links, because such lists already exist. The purpose is a small list with websites that can be checked thoroughly to learn more about the open access movement.

1665 >The First Journals were launched in London and Paris in 1665, as explained in May 2001 by Jean-Claude Guédon, professor at the University of Montreal, Quebec, during a meeting of librarians, with a paper published the same year by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) under the title: “In Oldenburg’s long shadow: librarians, research scientists, publishers, and the control of scientific publishing”.

1991-08 >arXiv was founded in August 1991 as an “e-print service” giving open access to articles in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics, with 902,217 articles on 29 December 2013, 987,000 articles on 15 November 2014, and 1,013,811 articles on 18 February 2015. arXiv is owned and operated by Cornell University, and funded by the Cornell University Library, the Simons Foundation and the member institutions.

1996-04 >
The Internet Public Library’s Periodical Collection was put together in spring 1996 “as the largest, and perhaps only, collection of open access magazines, journals and newspapers. Journals were/are a subset of the collection and, like anything else cataloged there, were only included if they were publicly available free of charge. Many others expanded it, maintained it, and even made a proper interface for it. 2015 seems to be the official end for the whole thing.” (Lars Noodén)

1997 >Hindawi was founded in 1997 as a commercial academic publisher of peer-reviewed, open access journals covering a number of academic disciplines, with 577 journals on 29 December 2013, 436 journals on 15 November 2014, and 438 journals on 18 February 2015. Hindawi has offices in Cairo, Egypt, and New York, USA.

1997 >MedKnow was founded in 1997 in Mumbai, India, as an open access publisher of peer-reviewed (online / print+online) STM journals published on behalf of learned societies and associations, with 319 journals in December 2013, 353 journals in November 2014, and 359 journals in February 2015. Medlow pioneers a “fee-less-free” model of open access publishing, and provides immediate free access to the electronic editions of the journals, the majority of which do not charge the author or author’s institution for submission, processing or publication of the articles. MedKnow makes revenue from print editions and from advertising, association memberships and author reprints. MedKnow was acquired by Wolters Kluwer Health in December 2011.

1997 >SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) was founded in 1997 in Brazil as a bibliographic database, a digital library and a cooperative electronic publishing model for open access journals in developing countries. Its database included 1,249 journals and 573,525 articles as of 28 December 2015. 14 countries participate in this network, most of them in Latin America, as well as South Africa, Spain and Portugal.

1998 >SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) was founded in 1998 by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) as an international alliance of academic and research libraries – mainly in North America for now – working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. As a major open access advocacy organization, SPARC has become a catalyst for change, and stimulates the emergence of new scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries.

1999 >EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) was founded in 1999 as an international organization working in collaboration with libraries in 60 developing and transition countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. One of its five programs is EIFL-OA, that advocates for open access to promote knowledge sharing. The
EIFL Open Access Programme has four main goals: (a) building capacity to launch open access repositories and to ensure their long-term sustainability; (b) offering training, supporting knowledge sharing, and providing expertise on open access policies and practices (open access journals, open access repositories, open access books, open data and open educational resources); (c) empowering librarians and library professionals, scholars, educators and students to become open access advocates; and (d) advocating nationally and internationally for the adoption of open access policies and mandates.

1999-12 >
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was founded in late 1999 to develop and promote interoperability standards facilitating the efficient dissemination of content. Many open access repositories now comply with the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting, which makes them interoperable. In practice, this means that users can find a work in an OAI-compliant archive without knowing which archives exist, where they are located or what they contain. With roots in the open access and institutional repository movement, the work of OAI has expanded over time to promote broad access to digital resources for eScholarship, eLearning and eScience.

2000 >BioMed Central was founded in 2000 as a STM publisher of peer-reviewed open access journals in all areas of biology, biomedicine and medicine. It was acquired by Springer in 2008. BioMed Central had 259 journals on 29 December 2013, 272 journals on 15 November 2014, 276 journals on 18 February 2015, and 285 journals on 20 June 2015. All original research articles are made freely accessible online immediately upon publication. BioMed Central levies an article processing charge to cover the cost of the publication process. Authors retain the copyright to their work, licensing it under a Creative Commons license which allows articles to be re-used and re-distributed without restriction, as long as the original work is correctly cited.

2000? >Microsoft Academic Search was “a free public search engine for academic papers and literature, developed by Microsoft Research for the purpose of algorithms research in object-level vertical search, data mining, entity linking, and data visualization. Although largely functional, the service is not intended to be a production web site and may be taken offline in the future when the research goals of the project have been met. According to a 2014 publication on arXiv, the service has not been updated since 2013 and seen a marked decline in the number of indexed documents since 2011. The fact that this decline has not been reported on earlier indicates to the authors that the service was largely ignored by academics and bibliometricians alike.” (Wikipedia)

2000-02 >PubMed Central (PMC) was founded in February 2000 by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) as an archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, first with free access to the index and abstracts of journal articles, and then (since 2004) with the free full text archive of these journals. Its use increased 100-fold, with one million visitors per day in 2004. PubMed Central archived 2.9 million articles in December 2013, 3.2 million articles in November 2014, 3.3 million articles in February 2015, and 3.5 million articles in June 2015.

2000-10 >
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) was founded in October 2000 as a nonprofit membership and advocacy organization that rapidly evolved into a driving force in the open access movement. In 2003, PLOS became a publisher to show how open access publishing could work. Seven open access journals were launched between 2004 and 2007: PLOS Biology, PLOS Medicine, PLOS Genetics, PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Pathogens, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, and PLOS ONE. PLOS ONE welcomes reports on primary research from any discipline, and has become the largest scientific journal worldwide. All PLOS authors publish under a Creative Commons BY-SA license. PLOS celebrated the milestone of 100,000 published articles on 16 December 2013.

2001 >Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 as a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through legal tools. The Creative Commons licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use authors’ work on conditions of their choice. These licenses let change the copyright term from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved”. They work alongside copyright and enable authors to modify their copyright terms to best suit their needs. The version 1.0 of the licenses was published in December 2002, the version 2.0 in May 2004, the version 3.0 (compatibility with other licenses) in February 2007, and the version 4.0 (international licenses) in November 2014. A Creative Commons license was used by one million works in 2003, 4.7 million works in 2004, 20 million works in 2005, 50 million works in 2006, 90 million works in 2007, 130 million works in 2008, 400 million works in 2010, and 882 million works in 2014.

2001 >Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales et Larry Sanger as a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project written collaboratively by thousands of volunteers. Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference websites. All Wikipedia articles are under a Creative Commons BY-SA license. In December 2004, Wikipedia had 1.3 million articles by 13,000 contributors in 100 languages. In December 2006, Wikipedia was among the top ten sites on the web, with 6 million articles. In 2008, Wikipedia was in the top five websites. In September 2010, Wikipedia had 14 million articles in 272 languages, including 3.4 million articles in English, 1.1 million articles in German and 1 million articles in French. Wikipedia celebrated its tenth anniversary in January 2011 with 17 million articles in 270 languages, and 400 million individual visits per month for all its websites.

2002-02 >
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) was signed on 14 February 2002 as the founding text of the open access movement: “By ‘open access’ to [research] literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” The BOAI is available in several languages.

2002-08 >SPARC Europe (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition Europe) was founded in August 2002 as an alliance of European academic and research libraries, national libraries, library organizations and research institutions. It wants to take the open access movement further, by means of education and advocacy, lobbying and networking, providing open access advocacy material, guidelines and recommendations, and encouraging the development of open access repositories. SPARC Europe has supported DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), founded in 2003, and OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories), founded in 2005. It also co-founded OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association), founded in 2008. (Please see below for DOAJ, OpenDOAR, and OASPA.)

2003 >
The DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) was founded in 2003 as a directory of open access scientific and scholarly journals in any field and language, with 9,800 journals on 29 December 2013, 10,068 journals on 15 November 2014 (with more than half of them searchable at article level), 10,224 journals on 18 February 2015, and 10,459 journals from 134 countries on 20 June 2015. With a new website launched in December 2013, DOAJ has become the authoritative source for users of quality open access journals who are either peer reviewed or using a quality control system. Their inclusion in DOAJ increases their visibility, ease of use and impact. DOAJ also encourages best practices amongst open access publishers.

2003 >ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) was founded in 2003 as an authoritative directory of open access repositories. ROAR has indexed the creation, location and growth of these repositories and their contents, with 3,924 repositories on 18 February 2015, and 4,009 repositories on 20 June 2015. Its aim is to promote the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories around the world. ROAR is hosted at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom, as part of the Eprints.org network, with funding from JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee). The other authoritative directory of open access repositories is OpenDoar (Directory of Open Access Repositories), created in February 2005 (please see below).

2003 >ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repositories Material Archiving Policies) – ROAR’s companion database – is an authoritative list of funder and university open access policies, charting the growth of open access mandates adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders. These mandates require that their researchers provide open access to their peer-reviewed research articles by depositing them in an open access repository. The first university open access mandate was adopted by the Department of Electronics and Computer Science of Southampton University in February 2003. The university-wide version was adopted in April 2008.

2003-06 >
The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing was the second founding statement of the open access movement (after the Budapest Open Access Initiative), released on 20 June 2003: “The purpose of this document is to stimulate discussion within the biomedical research community on how to proceed, as rapidly as possible, to the widely held goal of providing open access to the primary scientific literature.” The two other founding statements were the Budapest Open Access Initiative (signed on 14 February 2002) and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (signed on 22 October 2003) (please see above).

2003-10 >
The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was the third founding statement of the open access movement, signed on 22 October 2003. For a work to be open access, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.” The two earlier founding statements were the Budapest Open Access Initiative (signed on 14 February 2002) and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (signed on 20 June 2003) (please see above).

2004 >
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) was founded in 2004 as a coalition of patient groups, physicians, researchers, educational institutions, publishers and health promotion organizations that support barrier-free access to taxpayer-funded research. ATA is directed by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), a non-profit alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system for exchanging scholarly research results.

2004-09 >
A Bibliography on Citation Impact was released by Steve Hitchcock in September 2004, under the full title: “The effect of open access and downloads (‘hits’) on citation impact: a bibliography of studies”, published by The Open Citation Project, and regularly updated.

2004-11 >Google Scholar was launched by Google in November 2004 to provide “a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.”

2005-02 >OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) was founded in February 2005 as an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories, with 2,200 listings in December 2013, and 2,600 listings in November 2014. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded. OpenDOAR also provides tools and support to both repository administrators and service providers in sharing best practice and improving the quality of the repository infrastructure. OpenDOAR is maintained by SHERPA Services, based at the Centre for Research Communications at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. The other authoritative directory of open access repositories is ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories), created in 2003 (please see above).

2005-05 >
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is the largest source of funding for medical research in the world – and the largest funder of nonclassified research – by funding thousands of scientists in universities and research institutions across America and around the globe. The NIH open access policy was first proposed by the U.S. Congress in 2004, took effect as an encouragement policy in May 2005, and strengthened as a mandate in April 2008. Publisher accommodation of the NIH’s open access mandate is 100 percent.

2005-10 >Wellcome Trust, founded as early as 1936, is one of the largest funding agencies in biomedical research and the medical humanities, and in public engagement, education, and the application of research to improve health. Its open access mandate took effect in October 2005.

2005-11 >
A Journal Cost-Effectiveness Calculator was first posted in November 2005 by Theodore Bergstrom and R. Preston McAfee. This calculator computes the cost per article and cost per citation for about 5,000 well known academic journals, with a statistical summary since April 2011. The latest version is dated 2013 (as checked on 20 June 2015).

2006 >SHERPA/RoMEO (Rights Metadata for Open Archiving) was created in 2006 as a database of journal and publisher open access policies, summarizing publishers’ permissions for archiving articles, with a statistics page. RoMEO is part of SHERPA Services based at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. Current RoMEO development is funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee). SHERPA/JULIET – a companion of RoMEO – is a database of research funders’ open access policies.

2006 >OpenDepot is a repository for research work that is open to all researchers worldwide who are based at a university, college or research institution without a local repository service easily available to them. OpenDepot was originally designated and funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee). Since 2006, OpenDepot has been provided by EDINA, University of Edinburgh, a service funded by JISC. Other main repositories for research work are Academia.edu, created in 2008, and OpenAire, created in January 2010 (please see below).

2007 >SPARC: Open-access Journal Publishing Resource Index was created in 2007 by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) to provide an index of the best available resources to guide the launch and operation of an open access journal. This index offers eight sections: new journal planning, publishing program policies, governance issues, editorial issues, marketing & promotion, technical platform, sustainability, resource list.

2007-07 >Richard Poynder’s Open Access Interviews include interviews of leaders, thinkers and practitioners of the open access movement. Richard Poynder is an independent journalist and blogger who has been observing and reporting on the evolution of the open movement from its start in 2001. The first person to be interviewed in July 2007 was Stevan Harnad, a cognitive scientist at the University of Quebec in Montreal, and an open access advocate and archivangelist. Stevan Harnad has described Richard Poynder as “the chronicler, conscience, and gadfly laureate” of the open access movement.

2007-10 >Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS) was founded in October 2007 as an organization of universities and research institutions worldwide, and a major advocacy organization for university open access policies with regard to the creation, dissemination and preservation of research findings. The aim of EOS is to further the opening up of scholarship and research within the growing open access, open education, open science and open innovation movements.

2008 >Academia.edu was founded in 2008 as an online community of academic scholars, and more precisely a platform for academics to share research papers, with 6,350,998 participating researchers on 29 December 2013, 15,663,628 participating researchers on 15 November 2014, and 17,896,970 participating researchers on 18 February 2015. A study dated Spring 2015 found that papers uploaded to Academia.edu received an 83% boost in citations over five years. Other main repositories for research work are OpenDepot, created in 2006, and OpenAire, created in January 2010.

2008 >OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is an international initiative dedicated to open access monograph publishing. OAPEN started in 2008 as a project funded by the European Union, before continuing in April 2011 as a foundation. It has developed open access models for books in pilot projects experimenting a sustainable open access model for academic books in the humanities and social sciences, and has worked with academic publishers and research institutes all over Europe to aggregate their publications and build a collection of peer-reviewed open access books through the OAPEN Library, created in 2010. The OAPEN Library included 1,600 peer-reviewed books from 50+ publishers in July 2013.

2008 >OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association) was founded in 2008 as the professional association of open access publishers. Its mission is “to represent the interests of OA journal and book publishers globally in all scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines.” This mission is “carried out through exchanging information, setting standards, advancing models, advocacy, education, and the promotion of innovation, (…) with a shared interest in developing appropriate business models, tools and standards to support OA publishing.”

2008 >CiteSeerX was created in 2008 as “an evolving scientific literature digital library and search engine that has focused primarily on the literature in computer and information science. CiteSeerX aims to improve the dissemination of scientific literature and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness in the access of scientific and scholarly knowledge. Rather than creating just another digital library, CiteSeerx attempts to provide resources such as algorithms, data, metadata, services, techniques, and software that can be used to promote other digital libraries.”

2008-04 >
The Open Access Directory (OAD) was created in April 2008 by Peter Suber and Robin Peek as a wiki-based “compendium of factual lists about open access to science and scholarship, maintained by the open access community at large. By bringing many lists together in one place, OAD makes it easier for everyone to discover them, use them for reference and update them, with the goal to spread useful and accurate information.” Some key lists are: (a) a list of author addenda (allowing the published author to retain key rights, including the right to authorize open access), (b) a list of open access disciplinary repositories, (c) a list of open access book business models, (d) a list of open access journal business models, and (e) a timeline of the open access movement.

2008-10 >
The Open Access International Week is a global event organized once per year since October 2008. This week is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of open access, to share what they have learned with colleagues, and to inspire wider participation in helping to make open access a new norm in scholarship and research. The last Open Access International Week was on 20-26 October 2014, and the next one will be on 19-25 October 2015.

2009-01 >DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) was created on 1st September 2009 as a central, open access repository for members of the Harvard community, with 230 downloading countries on 29 December 2013, 4.1 million downloads in November 2014, 4.7 million downloads in February 2015, and 5.5 million downloads in June 2015. The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences was the first to vote unanimously for a strong open access policy in February 2008, and was joined by other Havard faculties then.

2009? >DSpace@MIT is an open access repository of MIT’s research that has included peer-reviewed articles, technical reports, working papers, theses and more, with 60,000+ items in December 2013 and one million end-user downloads per month, and with 70,000+ items in February 2015.

2009-02 >
The Timeline of the Open Access Movement by Peter Suber was a timeline of “the worldwide effort to provide free online access to scientific and scholarly research literature, especially peer-reviewed journal articles and their preprints”. His timeline was then turned over to the Open Access Directory (OAD) for it to be easier to read, to edit and to enlarge.

2009-04 >
The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) was created by Peter Suber in April 2009 as a real-time alert service using social tagging to capture and organize new open access developments worldwide – both news and comment – comprehensively and in real time. Contributors tag these developments using the tagging platforms of their choice. Open source software called TagTeam pulls these separate efforts together, creating a primary project feed on new developments and a series of secondary feeds on a range of subtopics. The project started on Connotea before moving to TagTeam in September 2012, with 28,206 items on 29 December 2013, 34,879 items on 15 November 2014, 36,645 items on 18 February 2015, and 38,886 items on 20 June 2015.

2009-08 >OASIS (Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook) was released in August 2009 by Leslie Chan and Alma Swan as a compendium of practical steps for implementing open access. OASIS covers the concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieve open access. The website highlights developments and initiatives from around the world, with links to diverse additional resources and case studies. Users are encouraged to share and download the resources provided, and to modify and customize them for local use.

2009-09 >COPE (Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity) started in September 2009 as a commitment to launch a fund to cover publication fees, and persuade other universities to follow suit and sign on to the compact. “The Compact for open access publishing equity supports equity of the business models by committing each university to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.”

2009-10 >COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) was founded in October 2009 as an association of repository initiatives. Its mission is to enhance the visibility and application of research outputs through a global network of open access repositories, and to develop a global repository community across countries, regions and disciplines. COAR had a membership of over 100 institutions from 35 countries in four continents in December 2013. Its activities have also included support for working and interest groups, advocacy activities and training opportunities.

2009-12 >DataCite was founded in December 2009 by several leading libraries as an international organization helping researchers to find, access and reuse data. It aims to establish easier access to research data, to increase acceptance of research data as legitimate contributions in the scholarly record, and to support data archiving to permit results to be verified and re-purposed for future study. DataCite has managed r3data.org since May 2015 (please see below).

2010-01 >OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) was founded in January 2010 to build support structures for researchers of all 27 European member states in depositing their research publications. It also aims to establish and operate an electronic infrastructure for handling peer-reviewed articles, preprints and conference publications, and manipulate research datasets of various forms in combination with research publications. OpenAIRE included 8,825,482 publications on 15 November 2014, 9,433,258 publications on 18 February 2015, and 11,534,086 publications and 7,874 datasets from 5,869 repositories and open access journals on 20 June 2015. Other main repositories for research work are OpenDepot, created in 2006, and Academia.edu, created in 2008.

2010-08 >
An Open Access Journal Bibliography was released in August 2010 by Charles W. Bailey Jr under the full title: “Open access bibliography: liberating scholarly literature with e-prints and open access journals”, published by Digital Scholarship. There is also a wiki-based version of its 2005 edition in the Open Access Directory (OAD).

2010-12 >
A Bibliography on Citation Impact was released in winter 2010 by Ben Wagner under the full title: “Open access citation advantage: an annotated bibliography”, published in Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship (ISTL). “This annotated bibliography lists studies and review articles that examine whether open access (OA) articles receive more citations than equivalent subscription, i.e. toll access (TA) articles.”

2012 >DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books) was founded in 2012 as a searchable index for peer-reviewed books published under an open access license, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository. The aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability and usage of open access books, and to provide an authoritative list of open access book publishers. Publishers provide the metadata of their open access books, to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. The index included 1,619 books from 54 publishers on 29 December 2013, 2,404 books from 79 publishers on 15 November 2014, 2,757 books from 94 publishers on 18 February 2015, and 3,126 books from 107 publishers on 20 June 2015. DOAB is a service of OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks).

2012 >IS4OA (Infrastructure Services for Open Access) was founded in 2012 by Alma Swan (co-founder and co-owner of Key Perspectives, and director of SPARC Europe) and Caroline Sutton (co-founder of Co-Action Publishing, and president of OASPA) as a UK-registered community interest company (CIC). “During the recent decade research results (publications) have increasingly been published in journals using an open access model which is different to the existing dominant model based on subscriptions (reader pays). However open access publications are not always easy to discover and locate.” As a result, IS4OA aims to “facilitate easy access to open access resources by providing a free-to-use discovery service for all users and a means to enable libraries to integrate open access publications in their services (library catalogues, web portals, etc.).”

2012-06 >Open Access was released in June 2012 by Peter Suber as a book-length introduction to open access, published by the MIT Press, and available in open access in various formats. Peter Suber has worked full-time for more than a decade to foster open access to science and scholarship, and is considered the de facto leader of the open access movement. His book includes ten chapters (what is open access?, motivation, varieties, policies, scope, copyright, economics, casualties, future, self-help), and is regularly updated online. Translations are available in Chinese, Greek and Polish, are under way into Arabic, Czech, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish (as of 20 June 2015).

2012-09 >
The BOAI10 Recommendations were published on 12 September 2012, ten years after the signing of the original Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) on 14 February 2002. The full title of the Recommendations is: “Ten years on from the Budapest Open Access Initiative: setting the default to open. Recommendations for the next 10 years.” These recommendations are available in several languages.

2014-01 >SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) started operating in January 2014 as an open access publishing initiative supported by 1,000 libraries, library consortia and research organizations in 24 countries. “Working with leading publishers, SCOAP3 is converting key journals in the field of high-energy physics to open access at no cost for authors. SCOAP3 is centrally paying publishers for the costs involved in providing open access, publishers in turn reduce subscription fees to their customers, who contribute to SCOAP3. Each country participates in a way commensurate to its scientific output in this field. In addition, existing open access journals are also centrally supported, removing any existing financial barrier for authors.” Authors retain copyright, and licenses enable wide re-use of this information. 5,000 articles were published by SCOAP3 in March 2015, and SCOAP3 supported by 3,000 libraries, research institutes and funding agencies from 41 participating countries.

2015-05 >Re3data.org (Registry of Research Data Repositories) was launched in May 2015, and is managed by the DataCite organization (founded in December 2009, please see above). “1,200 data repositories have been indexed by re3data.org and can be searched and accessed at its website or by using its API. Bringing this service together with DataCite, who mints and manages Digital Object Identifiers for datasets, will yield new opportunities to explore in combining a registry of data repositories with information about persisted datasets to create new value for the research community.”